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The Poet's Wisdom

The book explores the philosophical thinking of Petrarch and Boccaccio in contrast to the writings of contemporary mendicants. Examining both Latin and vernacular works, it investigates how these humanists poetically express the temporal, subjective, and emotional quality of moral sensibility, in a way that shifts to the reader the weight of discerning the ethical message.
The book centers its analysis on a series of paradoxes pondered by these humanists: the self that changes yet persists over time; the awareness of self-deception; the individual's validation of authority; and the ethics of pleasure.
This study is valuable to those interested in Renaissance philosophy, literature, religion, and the history of ideas.

Biographical note

Timothy Kircher, Ph.D. (1989) in History, Yale University, is Professor of History at Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina.

Readership

All those interested in intellectual history, the history of ideas, philosophy, Renaissance humanism and ecclesiastical history, as well as readers of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.

Reviews

Kircher’s combined talent for literary criticism and historical contextualization results in a most rewarding fusion which should be of inspiration to a new generation of Renaissance scholars.
Rocco Rubini, Forum Italicum 42.1 (2008): 231-33

Kircher has given the field an important work of literary criticism and philosophical investigation worthy of consideration from all scholars of Giovanni Boccaccio, challenging the reader to regard the Decameron as a foundational text of the philosophy of Italian Humanism.
Jason Houston, Heliotropia, 6.1-2 (2009)

Readers... will find the textual analyses of The Poet’s Wisdom wonderfully rich and rewarding. Kircher excavates their meaning and significance while accounting for social, political, and intellectual influences upon them, and with the skills of an acute literary critic he measures them carefully against the writings of mendicant preachers. He brings to the task a comprehensive interest in the philosophy of history, textual hermeneutics, and the integral relationship between style and thought, as parenthetical references to the theoretical work of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and G. Heath King enrich his detailed footnotes on the relevant scholarship in history, literary studies, theology, and philosophy. This is a head-clearing book that will reward scholars in all those fields.
Wiliam Kennedy, Renaissance Quarterly, 2006

Like Ronald Witt’s In the Footstep of the Ancients, Kircher’s The Poet’s Wisdom sheds new light on a critical period in the emergence of modern Western thought and letters.
David Marsh, Italian Quarterly, 2005.

The Poet's Wisdom is an excellent book. Its clarity of argument of exemplary, and it presents a convincing picture of the Decameron that answers some questions that have been nagged at critics over the years. It is a splendid addition to our understanding of early humanism and, especially, provides a new way of interpreting the Decameron. It should be read by scholars and students alike for its insights into the emerging world of Italian humanism.
Stephen Kolsky, Speculum (2007) 1006-1007.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations

I. Introduction
II. Tracking the Vagaries of Time: Anxiety and Freedom in Humanist Accounts of the Plague of 1348
III. Morality’s Hazy Mirror: The Humanist Modality of Moral Communication in the Decameron
IV. The Paradox of Experience and Moral Authority in Petrarch’s Writings
V. The Sea as an Image of Temporality
VI. The Ethics of Pleasure: Faces of the Feminine
VII. Senescence and Renascence

A study on the technique of painting through cross-analysis of literary texts by Leonardo, Vasari, Armenini, Borghini, Lomazzo and works of art, examining some significant paintings in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples.

Raybould's The Sibyl Series of the Fifteenth Century examines the change that occurred in representations of the sibyls during the early Renaissance, representations intended to provide new witness by these pagan prophetesses to the universality of the Christian message.

In The Accademia Pontaniana: A Model of a Humanist Network Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi explores the intellectual networks which developed around the fifteenth century humanist Pontano. She applies recent sociological theory to investigate links between the various Italian humanist circles.

Giannozzo Manetti’s New Testament offers an edition and analysis of the Latin translation of the Greek New Testament made at the Vatican court by the fifteenth-century humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459).

Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius is the first English translation of Pierre Bayle’s last book, Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste (1707), in which Bayle defends his skeptical writings on the problem of evil against Jean Le Clerc and Isaac Jaquelot.

In Exuberant Apotheoses: Italian Frescoes in the Holy Roman Empire, Daniel Fulco offers a vivid account of large-scale Italian frescoes that embellished eighteenth-century German baroque palaces and expressed noble patrons’ claim to princely power and political authority during the Enlightenment.

Michelangelo in the New Millennium addresses the mobility and flexibility of Michelangelo’s art regarding placement and intention, considers the artist’s late papal painting commissions, and probes deeper into his early religious works.